Aby Rosen’s RFR to tap Urban Compass for 61-story tower

Aby Rosen’s RFR Realty – which already leases more than 60,000 square feet of office space to Urban Compass – is poised to retain the brokerage to market its 61-story condo development in Midtown.

In what would be Urban Compass’ first large-scale new-development marketing deal, the firm would market the condos at 610 Lexington Avenue, located on the corner of East 53rd Street, Crain’s reported.

RFR borrowed $144.2 million for the project in 2007, but saw the project stall during the credit crisis. It’s now back on track, and the developer broke ground on the 303,000-square-foot project in February. At that time, RFR announced China Vanke, the largest publicly traded developer in China, would partner on the project.

Urban Compass is also a tenant in two of RFR’s buildings.

In August, the brokerage doubled its space at RFR’s 90 Fifth Avenue to 50,000 square feet, paying rents in the mid-$70s per square foot, according to CompStak data. A month later, it expanded to RFR’s trophy property, Lever House, where Urban Compass signed a lease for 10,700 square feet of space.

Last July, Roy Kim, a former top design executive at Gary Barnett’s Extell Development, joined Urban Compass to build a new development team.Urban Compass now has $2 billion in its new development pipeline, CEO Robert Reffkin told The Real Deallast month.

The firm is marketing Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s first residential building in New York, a seven-unit condo project at 152 Elizabeth Street in Nolita. [Crain’s] – E.B. Solomont